The woman was clearly still thinking of something else, and her eyes drifted over to one of Spere’s SOCO crew, who was dabbing at a countertop beside her with a cotton-tipped swab. He examined the end of the swab and put the whole thing into a ziplock bag.

“Mrs. Brennan?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t keep tabs on him. Maybe I should have kept tabs on him.” The baby’s mood had changed and now he was grabbing at the necklace that hung down between Mrs. Brennan’s breasts. She smiled at him with a worried expression. “Can someone call the hospital?”

His pulse, she’d been told when she called, had been thready at the crime scene, his vitals almost non-existent. Spere’s team was packing up. “She didn’t go upstairs, is that right?” Spere asked the stunned wife.

“No, no. I think they were in the kitchen the whole time.”

“All right, then,” he said. When he walked past Hazel, she smelled hot mustard on his breath.

“I think he’s getting hungry,” Mrs. Brennan said, and for a moment, Hazel had thought she meant Howard. “Can I feed him?”

“Of course,” said Hazel, and she watched the woman going through the motions of putting the baby into his bouncy chair on the countertop. She opened her freezer door and took out a couple of colourful frozen pucks off a cookie sheet, one green, one tan-coloured.

“I make his food,” she said to no one in particular. “It’s better for him.”

She put the little pucks into a bowl and stuck the bowl in the microwave. Hazel’s phone buzzed on her hip but only once and then it stopped. When Colleen’s back was turned to get the food, she quickly unhooked it to see if she’d missed a call. But it was a text message from Wingate: IS HE ALIVE? … She put the phone away. Janice Brennan was staring at her. “Was that the hospital?”

“No … no, something else. I’m sure they’re doing everything they can.” She moved to the other side of the counter, dismissing PC Quinn with a look, and Mrs. Brennan began to feed the squirming child. “Colleen … you said the girl wanted something from your husband. Did she say what it was?”

“No. Terry said he didn’t have it and the girl said she knew he didn’t have it, but then … then she –” She mechanically slotted the spoon into the baby’s open mouth, slipping in little loads of what Hazel thought was probably peas and chicken. She remembered briefly the pleasure of sating a baby’s hunger, how easy it was to know what they needed. “You think Terry was in trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Did he have debts? Did he have any … habits that were unusual?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” The woman was keeping her mind focused on the baby, but she was in shock. She held the spoon too far from the baby, and he, in turn, was watching her very closely. Finally, she put the spoon in his mouth.

Hazel asked her: “Can you think of any reason a strange girl would come into your house and – ”

Suddenly, the other woman dropped the baby’s bowl and spoon onto the countertop and gripped its edge, as if to stop herself from spinning out into space. The baby caught its breath, his hands shooting up in front of him, motionless. Then he opened his mouth and an unholy, piercing scream came out of him.

“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know any fucking thing at all! Okay?” She breathed willfully, trying to regain control. The baby had lapsed into the silent part of a deep, terrified infant squall, the silence that presages the heartsick-making wail that follows. They both waited it out, and Mrs. Brennan took the baby out of his chair and held him. “I don’t want to know who my husband is right now. If he’s a low-life, lying, cheating, sleazeball, it can wait. I just want to know what’s happening to him.”

“All right,” said Hazel, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m going to call the hospital in one minute. I, I was told the ambulance chopper will be putting down” – she looked at her watch in a sort of vaudeville gesture – “right about now. I can call down in, five minutes. But anything that might help us get a jump, Mrs. Brennan, for instance, do you have any idea – any idea at all – what might have connected your husband to this Kitty? Even a hunch?”

“Well, I guess he was screwing her, wasn’t he? And she showed up looking to see how much her silence was worth to him. He was going to tell me … but then she …” Mrs. Brennan trailed off. “She cut him anyway.”

Not money, Hazel thought again. And whatever it was, the girl was still hunting it. Her phone buzzed again. Just once. She asked to use the bathroom, and once the door was closed behind her, she unhooked it and looked at the screen. It read, Patient DOA. She looked at herself in the mirror. It was fixed to the wall. She forwarded the text to Wingate.

On her way out, she pulled Quinn aside and quietly told her to check the contents of the Brennans’ medicine cabinet.

Back in her cruiser, she phoned Forbes. The young fellow was cottoning to the job. He’d rented a car for today’s stakeout, to keep his identifiability low, and simply drove back and forth along Queesik Bay Road every twenty minutes or so, stopping here and there, at different distances from the Eagle, and noting his impressions. He told her there was increasing activity as the day went on: a lot of people buzzing around, a lot of traffic. It was now a week since Henry Wiest had told his wife he was going out to pick up some filters in Mayfair and had parked there, many kilometres from where anyone would have expected him to be, and been murdered. The case had put on flesh over the intervening week, and with the stolen vehicle and Brennan’s death, she felt that certain energies were gathering. The girl, this Kitty, had come out into the open. What did it mean? Was she done? Maybe, Hazel thought disconsolately, the case was already over.

What had happened in Queesik Bay a week ago had happened among a swarm of tourists coming through the region, as they did every weekend of the summer. Perhaps Henry or Kitty had used the cover of the crowds to conduct whatever business had been between them. If so, maybe the investigation could use the same cover to discreetly track one of those taxicabs. The traffic in the countryside on a mid-August weekend could be good camouflage for an unmarked to follow a taxicab. She called Wingate to ask him what he thought of that. He said it sounded risky. “But worth it?” she asked.

“It could be. As long as you’re discreet.”

“I’m the soul – ”

“Don’t even try. Just have an escape route in case anyone starts acting suspicious, okay?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“I’ll have the cell.”

______

She called Forbes in and drove her own car, the Mazda, directly to Mayfair and then tracked back up through the reserve toward the centre of the settlement. She passed the casino on her right and carried on until she reached the Eagle about six kilometres away, toward the Westmuir County town of Dublin.

When she got to the smoke shop, she parked her car exactly where Henry Wiest had, to test the universe, but also to see if the appearance of a car in that area was a signal to anyone. She stayed inside five minutes, looking alternately through the windshield into the woods and backwards in the rear-view. Her car, stopped where it was, appeared to spark no one’s interest at all, so she backed up and parked halfway between the road and the woods. She was more or less to the side of the shop now. The taxi stand was in front of the store, but both taxis were out on errands. The stand, with a lamppost beside it so it would be visible at night, was in an oil-slicked patch of gravel behind a low brick wall that enclosed an oval of grass and flowers.

She hadn’t seen any cameras around the back of the building, but there was one on an overhang that covered the long porch in the front of the shop. It had a view of the parking area she was coming out of, and she saw, as she came around the front, there was another camera above the door and pointing toward the road. None of this had been on RC Bellecourt’s report. It would have been useful to see those tapes. Why hadn’t they been collected? There were so many oversights in the reserve’s investigation that it made her furious.